A Tribute to Jim Martin

 

Woodworker and sculptor Jim Martin was well-known for walking his dog through the streets of New Hope. If you went out early in the morning for breakfast at The Golden Pump, you would be sure to see the two of them. It would cheer up the morning.

He seemed lonely but happy.

It was not just a once-a-day event that he walked his little dog, a white bichon frise with a mini-Afro on her head and a smaller Afro at the end of her tail. For locals and tourists, the daily walks this sensitive soul took with his cute pup could not have been a more charming event. The dog’s white fur matched the hair on Jim’s head and she scurried ahead of him so enthusiastically that he was forced to keep up. They seemed made for each other.

The promenade through town made him a kind of local celebrity. Some people said you could set your clocks by is walks, but I’m not sure of that, and the hordes of tourists stopped to watch and wonder or talk to him. He talked to thousands over the years, and amused and entertained them.

Jim’s shop was on North Main Street, right next to what is now The Landing. In the window was a wood carving that made just about anyone who walked by take a look. It was a finely carved screen with many interestingly conceived openings cut into glowing brown natural wood, with the wood almost golden in appearance. It didn’t represent anything and was only intended to be a gorgeous preservation of the natural world in art. In that, it succeeded.

In all the years I lived in New Hope, Jim’s window display never changed.

As surely as you could see him walking his dog every day, you could see that gloriously carved piece of wood in his window.

Jim passed away in 2020 at the age of 93, so you can be sure he logged about a million miles on his walks with his dogs. He lived so long in New Hope that one by one his wondrous little pups passed away. He lovingly replaced each of them with another bichon and continued on his endless walks.

When I knew him his dog’s name was Bijou, and she was among the earliest in a long line of pups that kept Jim happy and sane.

I was to learn why he depended so much on his little companions for love and affection. Some difficult things had happened to him, as they do to anyone who walks on two legs or four, yet he still had that big grin whenever you saw him on the street.

He had a quick wit and smiled often, but he was wrapped in a kind of sadness. In conversation, a joke would come out of thin air that only he could have thought of and had never remotely occurred to you. He tried so hard to please that sometimes the things he said got weird.

He was a member of The Greatest Generation, which was the title of a 1998 book by American journalist Tom Brokaw. Naming an entire generation that described the men who endured The Great Depression and World War II and somehow survived those two gigantic disasters, a pair of the biggest that ever befell mankind.

Jim joined the Navy at sixteen and assigned to the USS Santa Monica. He saw combat in some of the worst naval actions ever, especially The Battle of Okinawa, codenamed Operation Iceberg. The battle was the bloodiest in the Pacific, with fifty thousand Allied casualties and nearly one-hundred-and-twenty thousand Japanese casualties, not including civilians. Widespread use of kamikaze pilots to attack the naval invasion force resulted in severe losses of ships and men and utter terror for the Americans subject to those suicide attacks. The waves of hundreds of kamikaze pilots flew deadly missions targeting the American warships leading the invasion. Their planes were loaded with fuel and five-hundred pound bombs set to detonate on impact, and the kamikazes often hit their marks.

The battle lasted from early April, 1945 through June of that year.

Imagine enduring those things, screaming fighter planes diving down out of the sky exploding into and burning ships and humans all around, for all those months, one after the other.

“Y-you don’t f-forget t-things like that,” Jim said to me.

Yes, he stuttered when we talked about the battle that time, that one time only. He normally did not speak much about the war. It was something to forget. He went to art school in Trenton, and then apprenticed with internationally renowned woodworker and furniture-make George Nakashima, who had been interred during the war as an American of Japanese origin. So while Jim was off dodging kamikazes in the Pacific, Nakashima was in a California internment camp. It was an irony not lost by either man that both should meet and work together in New Hope.

The drama of his war experiences was enough to make Jim seek the peace and art and solitude of New Hope, and to seek the delights of walking his wonderful little dogs through town after the horrors of war.

His gifts as a wood sculptor were clearly evident, and he produced beautiful pieces, but not many of them. It was almost as though he concluded he had had enough of the outside world, that he was emptied by it, and found his solace in town. Most men who returned from the war found jobs and married. Jim chose art instead, but he did marry, I understand.

Strangely, he seemed to stop producing his sculptures altogether at one point, and simply lived for his dogs and the town life.

Let me tell you a bar story.

I was working at The Landing as a bartender. Jim came in nearly every night and had a few beers. That’s when he told me about Okinawa.

The piano player there was friends with Jim, but he was not pleased that Jim had stopped producing his art.

“He’s got this wonderful talent, but he doesn’t work at it,” the piano player said to me. “He’s had the same display in his window for years.”

Jim was impoverished from his depression, not from a lack of talent, unable to make much money and rumored to depend on family for it. His kind friends from town would help him by salting the streets with change every day, literally dropping quarters on the paths he took while walking his little dogs. He never knew how much they admired him.

“There’s always money on the streets,” he told me one night in wonder. “It’s amazing what you can pick up.”

Jim arrived at the bar each night just as the day bartender, a friend of his named John, was going off his shift and I was coming on. The two of them would sit and talk at the bar and drink and laugh as I started work. It wasn’t a very busy time of night, so I’d get involved in the merriment.

One night I got to learn a little more about why he loved his dog walks through town so much.

“I was reading about Lenny Bruce today,” I said, out of the blue, just to make conversation. “Did you ever hear any of his comedy routines?”

It was a shot in the dark during a lull in the talk, but it met with the kind of roaring success Lenny’s comedy routines met with. Both John and Jim broke out in hysterical laughter. I couldn’t understand how I had succeeded in saying something so funny just by mentioning Lenny Bruce.

“Yeah, I’ve heard of him,” Jim said.

“Once Lenny came into town,” John went on. “He left with Jim’s wife.”

They kept laughing, so it wasn’t a down moment. I had admired Lenny Bruce’s work up until that point, thinking its crass satire and smoke-and-alcohol-saturated targeted cursing and satire was just what American society needed to wake up to its ills, but I never much admired him after that. I hoped the story was not true, just another eighty-proof figment, but I’m afraid it seemed very real to me.

Now I’ll say something shocking but true, as I imitate Lenny Bruce.

If I had to say who the better artist was, Jim Martin or Lenny Bruce, I’d choose Jim, even if his wife did not.

In two hundred years someone who sees one of Jim’s few carvings will admire its beauty.

If in two hundred years someone hears one of Lenny Bruce’s routines, that person won’t know what the hell he was talking about.

Beauty lasts.

That’s the test of an artist. It talks of how well he endured the violence and heartbreak of his life and still produced something stunning. It talks of continuing when you’ve had your guts torn out.

Jim Martin was made lonely by war and the allure of the crass fame of another man.

He still had the great pleasures of the walks with his dogs in a town that admired and supported him and will continue to admire his art and him.